Writer, blogger, troublemaker

Contradictions

Sometimes you spend lots of time and effort getting your campaign message just right, and run it, and then find that some bastard’s telling people the exact opposite.

Like this ad for Recycle For London, with the line “Starve your bin”. It’s fairly new and it’s occupying lots of media space in London, so I’ve seen it often. I’ve received the message that I should stop feeding my bin, and start recycling. Here’s one of the press ads:

But then I go into the kitchen at work, after we’ve had some meeting sandwiches delivered from O’Briens (I point out that they were meeting sandwiches because I’d never buy from O’Briens and you shouldn’t either. I used to work there. The things I’ve seen…) and see this on the paper bags:

“Bins get hungry too. Please feed them.”

Right below a message about the bag being recycled, too. How ironic.

Now I know that the O’Briens message is supposed to be a friendly-tone-of-voiced way of saying “don’t chuck this bag on the pavement, you filthy lout” but it’s pretty much directly contradicting the recycling ad. For shame, O’Briens. And not just because you put inedible things in sandwiches and laugh about it.